A couple of weeks ago, the feminist blog Jezebel ran an advance review of my new book, proclaiming in the lead paragraph: “Rachel Shukert’s new memoir, Everything Is Going To be Great, does something unfortunately rare in women’s writing: celebrating mistakes.”

I was thrilled. My mother, however, was not.

“I just don’t understand how that’s good,” she said, when I showed her the article, furrowing her brow as she mentally flashed through the various escapades detailed in my chronicle of the two, mostly disastrous years i spent living in Europe: the public drunkenness, the sexually predatory Italian dental students, the much older Austrian men who may or may not be the sons of former Gestapo agents. And those are just the funny parts. “Why would you want people to think you’re a screw-up?” she asked.

This stung a little, but I could understand her reservations. The girls of my generation were raised to be perfect. Our high-achieving baby-boomer mothers had labored mightily to raise us in a world where our potential would be unfettered. We were supposed to grow up to be physicists and judges and CEOs. Failing grades, ill-advised sexual encounters, or as, I did, running penniless to Europe for two years to get away from an expectation of success no less restrictive than one of Betty Draper’s iron girdles (not to mention falling into a painful and destructive relationship with a man who already had a girlfriend): these were more than simply personal failings. These were an affront to the sisterhood, all the battles that had been waged a generation ago in our name. If we screwed up, we were letting the team down.

This expectant disapproval doesn’t only come from people who essentially have our best interests at heart. When it comes to women making mistakes, our culture is woefully schizophrenic. On the one hand, women in the public eye who flout the rules or behave badly are vilified beyond all sense — from the glee emanating from some quarters over the incarceration of Lindsay Lohan, to name just one example, you’d think an escaped war criminal was finally being brought to justice. Sixteen years later (boy, am I old) you still can’t read an Internet thread about Courtney Love that doesn’t somewhere accuse her of directly or indirectly murdering Kurt Cobain–an allegation I find so needlessly cruel it makes me wince just typing it here.

On the other, being perfect hardly saves you from ridicule. Look at the standard heroine of a rote Hollywood romantic comedy: she’s typically a perfectionist career woman who is fabulously accomplished and successful yet a) can’t manage to walk to her car without falling flat on her face; b) is ritualistically humiliated (read: humanized) by randy pets or giant and/or vibrating underpants; or c) so insanely uptight that they can’t so much as drink a damn shot of tequila at a party until some podgy, underemployed male tells them its all right, then has to hold her hair back while she pukes. (At which point they naturally fall in love. He’s seen her fail, so now he’s comfortable having sex with her.)

Given these vitriolic attitudes, it’s not surprising that many female authors have become self-censoring, even, or perhaps especially, when they are writing about their own experience.

Which brings me to “Eat Pray Love,” a memoir on which I keep being asked my thoughts, due to its cultural ubiquity and its similarity in subject matter to my book. At first glance, Elizabeth Gilbert is reflexively, almost compulsively self-deprecating. She criticizes herself for everything — her ever-increasing pant size, the frivolity of her inner monologue during meditation — everything, that is, except the impetus for her journey in the first place: the breakdown of her marriage. On this subject (and this subject alone), she is conspicuously silent. We hear about her grief, and her husband’s anger (at which she feigns incredulity), but if you want to really want to figure out what went down, you have to read between the lines (hint: I don’t think it was just that she didn’t want kids.) To admit that she did something genuinely hurtful, that she was not so much a victim of circumstance as lying in a bed that she herself had made, might have added real depth to her character, and made for a far more interesting book, but it would undoubtedly have made her less sympathetic to her audience. It’s hard to imagine Oprah, who rarely shrinks from moralizing on experiences she’s never had, endorsing such a work. Gilbert exchanged honesty for likability, and now she’s being played by Julia Roberts in a movie. It’s a canny trade-off, but it’s one I wish she hadn’t had to make.

Women are constantly judged, so we reflexively judge each other. We’re too fat or too thin; too sexy or not sexy enough; too uptight or too lazy, too feminist or not feminist enough. But in our hypercritical judgment, we miss the entire point of feminism, which was not to transform us all into high-achieving super-beings (or sympathetic victims), but about the universal recognition of the fact that women are as fully human as men.

This means accepting, each other, and ourselves, for what we are warts and all.

We are none of us perfect. And that’s what makes us great.

Rachel Shukert is the author of Everything Is Going To Be Great and Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable stories. Follow her on Twitter www.twitter.com/@RachelShukert

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